


A World Alone

by lafiametta



Category: Damnation (TV)
Genre: Between 1x09 and 1x10, F/M, Prompt Fic, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 17:00:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13722084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lafiametta/pseuds/lafiametta
Summary: After the shootout on the Riley farm, Creeley has a most peculiar dream.





	A World Alone

**Prompt:**  “In episode 10 Creeley tells Bessie had had the strangest dream.  I want to know what was that dream -Thanks!”

* * *

Creeley volunteered to take the first watch that night. 

It wasn’t much of a hardship: he didn’t feel like sleeping just yet, his blood still hot from the shootout with all those damn black-hooded bastards. As the house settled down for the night, he watched Martha Riley shepherd the women and children into the back bedrooms, pulling down extra quilts from the linen closet, making sure the young ones said their prayers while she tucked them into bed. The men, for their part, just found some available bit of space on the floor of the front parlor. One by one they sat, tiredly shucking their boots off, but he noted that even as they lay their bodies down to rest, they kept their guns within arm’s reach.  

He stood out on the porch for a while, pacing back and forth, stopping every now and then to stare out at the fathomless dark depths of the fields that surrounded the house, his ears pricked for any sound beyond the gentle snores of the men sleeping inside. All was calm and quiet, just as it should be, as if it were any other night in rural Iowa. As if there weren’t dozens of dead men laying all around him, a decent number of which Creeley knew he was personally responsible for killing. But they didn’t matter now: they could all keep until morning. All that mattered was waiting and watching and making damn sure nothing else came out of the darkness to threaten this farm tonight.

He tried not to think about Bessie. 

After a couple of hours, Creeley could feel his body begin to tire, the day’s events catching up to him at last. He swept his gaze one final time over the midnight sky and then made his way inside, his boots creaking softly along the wooden floorboards. He found Seth sleeping near one of the windows. It didn’t take more than just a quick shake of his shoulder to wake him; his brother had always been a light sleeper, even as a boy. With a silent nod of his head, Seth got to his feet and headed outside, and Creeley could hear his shuffle as he stepped out on the porch. Creeley sat down, leaning his back against the wall, knowing full well he would sleep less comfortably that way, but willing to set aside the discomfort. He had learned a fair number of things during his time in prison, first and foremost that sleeping flat on your back meant you couldn’t always be ready for whatever might be coming your way.

He stretched his legs out in front of him and tipped his hat down over his eyes, letting exhaustion wash over him like a wave. It didn’t take more than a minute or so for sleep to overtake him and gently ease him into the realm of dreams. 

His mind opened to a world so painful in its familiarity that for a moment he could only think to shut his eyes again and hope to find himself somewhere else altogether. He had been gone for more than seven years, but even with a cursory glance he could see that everything looked exactly as he remembered it. The bunk room was still small and dark, owing to the single window and the low-laid roof beams, making the whole place feel like it was closing in on him like the lid of a coffin. There wasn’t much furniture, just the two twin beds for him and Seth and a white-washed nightstand, and as Creeley looked over at Seth’s bed, he saw that it was neatly made up, the faded quilt laying smooth and undisturbed. 

He was back home, in Wyoming. Of all the goddamn places. 

He stood up, ignoring the rusty creak of bedsprings, and tottered into the main room of the house, expecting to find someone – Seth or Lew, or even his pa – sitting at the table. But it was empty, the old wooden chairs all tucked smartly into place. The same went for the kitchen and for pa’s bedroom. He didn’t really understand it; normally, there was always someone around, if not his brothers, then one of pa’s hired men. Creeley methodically made his way through the house, seeing nothing out of order, nothing – besides the total absence of people – to make him think there was anything wrong at all. 

It felt strange, like some kind of ghost story he had up and wandered into, although he reckoned there was always the chance that  _he_  was the ghost in this particular version.

Outside, the mid-morning sun was heavy on his shoulders. He called out to no one in particular – maybe just wanting to hear the sound of his own voice, to know it still worked – and then made a wide sweep of the ranch’s perimeter, seeing nothing but a pair of hawks spiraling upwards in a thermal and a cottontail as it skittered off into the grasses. With a sudden realization, he headed towards the barn, and found – to some relief – that each of the stalls was full, a few of the occupants nosing their way over the latched doors at his approach. Pa’s horse was there, as was Seth’s and Lew’s, and at the end of the row was his own, a black gelding with a stubborn disposition who he had christened Ajax. But none of it made much sense to him: if everyone had gone, why hadn’t they taken the horses? 

Giving rein to the sense of disquiet he felt growing in his belly, Creeley quickly saddled his horse and mounted up, spurring him into a brisk gallop until the ranch house was little more than a smudge in the distance. He rode hard, thinking that the people who lived at the next farm over might have some answers for him. But when he got there, there was no one who answered his greeting call, no one to come out onto the porch and ask after his business. Inside, the place was empty, eerily quiet, all the furniture tidily arranged as if it had only just been left that way. 

He felt no desire to linger, and so he rode on, every human habitation that he came across telling the same story. He was – or so it seemed – bizarrely and inexplicably alone.

It didn’t take long before he reached Laramie, a town he had visited a few times growing up, most memorably when Seth and Lew had taken it upon themselves to help Creeley divest himself of his virginity, pooling their meager savings to buy him a few hours with the best-looking whore they could afford. As Creeley rode down the deserted main street, he had little trouble recognizing the location of the brothel, and he darted a glance up at the windows, hoping perhaps to see that dark-haired girl’s face looking out at him from behind the gauzy curtains. But there was nobody there to look at him, not in the window of the brothel, not inside the grocer’s or the five and dime, not walking down the street to give him a tip of the hat and a how-do-you-do.

He tied up Ajax along a post – although why he bothered, he didn’t really know – and strolled into the nearest cafe. There wasn’t anybody there to serve him, of course, and even he could see the dark humor in the fact that the thick fold of hundred dollar bills in his wallet amounted to absolutely nothing in a world where there was no one around to take his money. Back in the kitchen he found coffee and fresh eggs, and managed to fry himself up a halfway decent omelet while he waited for the water to boil on the stove. 

It occurred to him while he was eating that if everything in this strange abandoned world was just free for the taking – nobody was around to object, after all – there was no need to confine himself to just a few eggs and a cup of coffee. Saddling up once more, he soon found the house of what had to have been the richest man in town, a stately, lilac-colored mansion girded by a wide wrap-around porch. Creeley shamelessly strolled through the door and made himself at home, searching first for the liquor, which he found in the study, halfheartedly concealed within the bookcase. He took a long swig, rewarded by the telltale warmth of fine Kentucky bourbon, and proceeded to commence his explorations. He traipsed into the kitchen and ate food right out of the icebox and then, once upstairs, tried on each of the dark gabardine suits hanging in the closet before finally falling asleep in one of the softest feather beds he had ever had the good fortune to rest his head upon.  

Here, he realized, as he lay half-drunk upon the bed, he was at last a free man: free from the collar placed around his neck by the likes of Eggers Hyde and Tennyson Duvall, free from the barking orders of every warden and chain gang guard that had sought to break him, free from the long arm of the law that wanted nothing more than see him put back into a cage. The world had not been so very kind to Creeley; was it wrong to breathe a sigh of relief that he had somehow been allowed to escape it? 

He wasn’t in a ghost story after all. It was paradise – and it existed solely for him. 

He could have spent forever there – and maybe he did. Time began to move in ways that followed no real rhythm, no easily recognizable pattern of day and night. He stayed in the lilac-colored mansion for what felt like months – or perhaps just a single afternoon – until he finally moved on and found another house and then another and another, until there was nowhere else in Laramie that he had not made a part of his dominion. Filled with a restless desire to continue onwards, to know what other wonders might be found within his solitary kingdom, he found a sharp two-toned Studebaker parked along the street, its tank serendipitously filled up with gas, and started driving west in the direction of the setting sun. 

He followed the empty roads through grassland and open prairie, watched the vastness of America roll by through the window panes. Grasses gave way to scrubby plains, which in turn gave way to arid desert, bare but for the occasional cactus or tuft of creosote. Now and again tiny fragments of civilization floated by on the edges of his sight, small towns sometimes, but more often than not just a long-abandoned homesteader cabin silently awaiting its own ruin and decay. And in all that wide expanse, time unspooling in a measureless circle, Creeley failed to encounter another single human being.

He drove until he could go no further, until he was swallowed up by the growing sprawl that could have only been the city of Los Angeles, palm trees lining the deserted avenues, movie theatre marquees proudly displaying the names of pictures that no one would be there to see. The road itself at last came to an end just as it reached the ocean, a vast and unknowable sweep of blue and gray extending indefinitely towards the horizon. Creeley had never seen the ocean before – all he knew was what he had caught glimpses of in magazines – and in slack-jawed awe he found himself getting out of the car, slipping off his boots and rolling up his pants before he stepped out onto the sand. 

The surf was warm as it brushed against his ankles, gentle and comforting as a mother’s embrace. But as he watched the sunlight paint itself in shimmering gold along the waves, he somehow knew that, as miraculous as this all was, he still hadn’t found what he had been searching for. What that thing was, he couldn’t entirely articulate, but the idea of it - soft and vague and unrealized within his breast - was enough to make him shake the sand from off his feet and head back onto the open road once more.

This time, though, he drove east, compelled by forces he wasn’t sure he fully understood. It was only as Creeley passed the worn sign along the side of the road welcoming him to Iowa that he finally realized where he had been headed and what - at long last - he had been hoping to find. 

The house was still there, on the outskirts of town, ringed by pine trees and a scattering of cows that paid him no mind as they ground down upon their cud. 

His heart beat roughly against his ribs as he stepped onto the porch, filled with equal parts excitement and fear for what he might find inside. Even in the mid-afternoon, the front hallway was shadowy and dark, and so Creeley pulled his hat from off his head, listening for the sound of human voices as he came closer to the parlor door. There was nothing, not a hint of sound, and his heart sank a little, the taste of disappointment bitter on his tongue. But then, as he turned the brass handle and stepped into the room, he was rewarded with a vision so fine he knew he would have gladly travelled back and forth across the continent a thousand times just to see it.

There she was, sitting in that brown leather chair, just as she had at that first moment he laid eyes on her. The afternoon sun was pouring in through the window, illuminating her hair and the side of her face, the smooth skin of her bare legs as they lay tucked up underneath her, at once a dazzling mixture of decadence and innocence. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful. She turned her head to look at him, the disbelief in her eyes surely equal to his own, and then, with slightly unsteady legs, rose up onto her feet and took a hesitant step towards where he stood. 

Creeley didn’t know what to say to her - nor was he quite sure how well his voice even worked, having gone so long without speaking to another person - so instead he came closer, hat still in hand, and with reverential fingers reached out to cup her cheek. 

Bessie blinked, staring up at him, until at last the corners of her mouth began to turn upwards, her lips pink and perfectly full as they curled into a smile.

“Creeley,” she asked, barely more than a whisper, “where did everybody go?”

“I don’t know, darlin’,” he murmured roughly, taking the opportunity to wrap his other arm around her waist and pull her in close. “But right now I’m not sure I give a good goddamn.”

Time seemed to still as he leaned down and pressed his mouth to hers, the moment lengthening on beyond the boundaries of the possible. Innumerable lifetimes were spent as they held fast to one another in the middle of that whorehouse parlor, content enough to be the only two people left in the whole godforsaken world. But somehow, even in the midst of that all-consuming haze, Creeley felt the illusion start to crumble as he slowly came to the realization of what all this truly was, knowing that he had merely to concentrate hard enough and he could free himself from the confines of this dream and return to the world of reality. 

He glanced down at Bessie, her dark eyes needful and full of tenderness, and even though he knew that none of it was real, he didn’t care. Reality would come soon enough, he reckoned; why grant it even a moment more of victory?

* * *

Daybreak at last found the Riley farm, morning light peeking in through the curtains and falling in pale streaks along the floorboards. No one was awake just yet, the night’s exertions having taken their toll, but had anyone come across upon the sleeping form of Creeley Turner, still sitting upright against the wall, they would have been struck by a fairly surprising sight. For just beneath the downturned brim of his hat, a faint smile of delight played upon his lips, sweet enough to transform him into a nearly altogether different man. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr (@lafiametta) about Damnation - I need to commiserate!


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